Ghosts Among Us

The Eerie Allure of Abandoned Towns

By Jeff Fetzer
Penn Lines Contributor

 

A raven, overhead but unseen, croaks out a guttural greeting as darkness descends on the scattered tombstones atop Barclay Mountain.

The lone visitor to the ancient burial site on a cool August eve slips a notepad into his shirt pocket and sits down on a stump, awaiting nightfall and any shadows it may stir. As an orange-hued gibbous moon peaks through an opening in the pines along the western bounds of the cemetery, the only sound to break the stillness is a steady chorus of crickets. Within the graveyard itself, there is only silence — where the dead rest in peace.

But it wasn’t always so tranquil here.

Throughout the latter half of the 1800s, Barclay Mountain hummed with the sounds of labor, life, and death — the clanging of pickaxes, the rumble of horse-drawn coal carts, the chugging and hissing of steam engines, the chatter of school children playing at the village picnic grounds, and the tolling of church bells to mark the passing of a miner or, more often, a miner’s child.

At the time, big coal and railroad companies began building company towns on this remote mountain in southwestern Bradford County: Carbon Run, Fall Creek, Foot of Plane, Long Valley, and Barclay, the largest of the five. By the early 1900s, after five decades of continuous mining, most of the coal had been removed from the mountain. With profits dwindling, companies pulled up stakes, and the villages and settlements were largely abandoned. The miners and their families, mostly immigrants, moved on, and the buildings they lived in, learned in, and worshipped in were either dismantled and repurposed, lost to fire, or overtaken by the elements. A century later, all that remained were remnants of stone foundations and grave markers buried in the underbrush.

We call these abandoned places ghost towns, and Pennsylvania, due to its abundance of natural resources — like coal, oil, and timber — and the boom-and-bust nature of those industries, is full of them.

‘Unsettling and intriguing’

According to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, there are at least 110 ghost towns in the Commonwealth, the most of any state in the Northeast. Experts say while a number of western states can boast more than Pennsylvania, few, if any, can claim the diversity found here.

“The western states, with the Gold Rush, were all mining towns,” says David Richards, an author and historian from Gettysburg. “But in Pennsylvania, you have ghost towns that were lumber towns, coal towns, iron towns, oil towns … so you have a much broader spectrum.”
 

A pair of goats wander the empty streets of Yellow Dog Village, Armstrong County’s modern-day ghost town.
MODERN-DAY GHOST TOWN: A pair of goats wander the empty streets of Yellow Dog Village, Armstrong County’s modern-day ghost town. The 30-acre village, abandoned in the early 2000s, is being transformed into a tourist attraction that can be explored for a fee. (Photo by Jeff Fetzer)
 

Others were also founded around religion, like Beulah in Cambria County and Celestia in Sullivan County. French Azilum, a planned settlement in Bradford County, was built in 1793 for refugees fleeing the French Revolution, and Ole Bull’s Colony, or Oleana, a community of several hundred Norwegians in Potter County, was built in 1852 and abandoned a year later.

While little remains physically, these desolate haunts continue to captivate the imagination of those who visit them purposefully or stumble upon their crumbling remains by happenstance.

While hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Lebanon County in 2003, Susan Hutchison Tassin of Gettysburg came upon the ruins of a ghost town known as Rausch Gap. The deserted coal mining and railroading community existed from 1828 to 1910 and, at its peak, had more than 1,000 residents.

“It really lit a fire under me,” says Tassin, a school psychologist. “How did a town this big just disappear?”

As Tassin told friends about her discovery, she soon realized others shared her interest.

“People are fascinated by abandoned places,” Tassin says. “They give us a sense of our own transience. Stumbling upon an old town can be both unsettling and intriguing. It’s fascinating to wonder if our own town may one day be gone and discovered by others as they are hiking in the woods.”

Bradford County historian Malin D. Martin stands amidst the weathered marble tombstones of Barclay Cemetery, one of the last visible traces of the once-thriving mountain-top coal mining town of Barclay in Franklin Township.
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: Bradford County historian Malin D. Martin stands amidst the weathered marble tombstones of Barclay Cemetery, one of the last visible traces of the once-thriving mountain-top coal mining town of Barclay in Franklin Township. Thanks to Martin and others, the cemetery is being restored and maintained. (Photo by Jeff Fetzer)
 

A history buff and native of Williamsport, Tassin decided she wanted to help put the Commonwealth’s ghost towns on the map. Her guidebook, “Pennsylvania Ghost Towns: Uncovering the Hidden Past,” was published in 2007 and provides a brief history of 46 such towns, along with information about what remains of each today and directions to the sites. The book is available on Amazon.

“My hope is that in writing this book, these sites will survive,” she writes in the forward. “Many are in danger of disappearing forever, and a few already have. Perhaps this book will help a few of these towns live on, if only in memory.”

Tassin isn’t alone in her efforts to preserve and commemorate the history of some of the state’s ghost towns. The Ghost Town Trail in Indiana and Cambria counties is a 46-mile-long rail-trail that takes hikers and bikers through eight extinct coal mining villages. The largest of those, Wehrum, was once home to 230 houses, a hotel, company store, jail and bank. According to Wikipedia, Indiana County, where REA Energy Cooperative is based, has more ghost towns than any other county in the state.

Yellow Dog Village: a walk down memory lane

In neighboring Armstrong County, a portion of which is served by REA Energy, the public can get a close-up view of a deteriorating modern-day ghost town. For a fee, Latif Yeniceri, owner of Yellow Dog Village near the town of Worthington, allows visitors to enter his 30-acre property to wander the streets and tour the dilapidated 1920s-era homes of an abandoned limestone mining town.

Billed as “a charming and spooky little ghost town,” Yellow Dog Village was established by the Pittsburgh Limestone Corp. to provide housing for workers and their families. The village takes its name from the “yellow dog contracts” that miners signed to prevent them from joining unions in exchange for job security and housing.

The mining company shut down operations in the 1950s, but many residents remained in the village until contaminated drinking supplies forced them to evacuate in the early 2000s.

Yeniceri lived in Pittsburgh before buying the property in 2021, and says he and wife, Maysa, were hoping to escape the city when they bought the quiet, rural village. They now live in one of the houses, which requires them to have potable water delivered. The couple, however, is hoping a new well will yield drinkable water for them and future residents.
 

A Climax locomotive pulls away from the hardwood mill pond in the lumber town of Masten, Lycoming County.
MASTEN’S HEYDAY: A Climax locomotive pulls away from the hardwood mill pond in the lumber town of Masten, Lycoming County. The remote mountain community, which existed from 1906 to 1930, had a peak population of around 1,000. (Photo courtesy of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania)
 

Yeniceri plans to repair several of the houses and rent them to tenants. He also wants to turn the “old manager’s house” into a vacation rental for tourists who want to stay in an authentic ghost town. Currently, he’s converting the former chapel into a visitor center.

To help fund his dream, Yeniceri began offering tours of Yellow Dog Village last year. Open houses are held on designated weekends throughout the year, and self-guided tours are offered year-round by appointment. After paying a $30 admission fee and signing a waiver, a visitor can roam the streets and explore the abandoned dwellings.

Wallpaper and peeling paint hang from the walls, ceiling fan blades droop from their motor housings, and the moss-covered carpets and weathered hardwood floors are littered with items their last occupants didn’t deem worthy of hauling away — furniture and old photos, books and boots, children’s toys and television sets, appliances and even a piano with a 1970s-era wedding album resting on top.

“The new generation needs to see this, to see how lucky they are,” Yeniceri says. “That’s why I want to protect it. The families here were living under very tough conditions, where they could barely find food to eat. They didn’t have a kitchen with running water. They were barely surviving.”

In many of these communities, workers were just trying to survive and provide for their families. But the thousands of dreamers, schemers, speculators and laborers who flocked to the state’s largest ghost town, Pithole City in Venango County, in 1865 were looking to strike it rich in the country’s fledgling oil industry.

Pithole City: 15,000 people, 15 months and gone

Six years earlier, the Drake Well, the nation’s first commercial oil well, began pumping out black gold after its discovery along Oil Creek, about 12 miles away from what would become Pithole City.

“After the oil industry started here at the Drake Well site in August of 1859, everybody wanted to come to northwestern Pennsylvania to find their fortune in oil,” says Sarah Goodman, educator for the Drake Well Museum in Titusville.

In January 1864, speculator Isaiah Frazier leased two tracts of land, totaling 35 acres, along Pithole Creek and began prospecting for oil. In January 1865, the Frazier Well struck oil.

“The amount of oil that came out of that well was astonishing,” Goodman says. “And so that made everybody flock to the Pithole area to start drilling for oil to become super wealthy.”

Almost overnight, the site was transformed into a booming city, and by the end of 1865, Pithole City was bustling with more than 15,000 residents.

“Everything just exploded,” Goodman says. “They built over 50 hotels, churches, theaters, boarding houses, pool halls, all the businesses you can think of … jewelry shops, bakeries, flower shops … all within a few months. And one of the neatest things is that there were grand theaters, like the Murphy Theatre, that rivaled those in New York.”

Goodman says Pithole City was more akin to a Wild West gold mining town than the subsistence-level coal and lumber towns found elsewhere in the state in the mid- to late 1800s. “This was the Deadwood of its day,” Goodman says, referring to the famous South Dakota gold rush town that was home to Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane in the 1870s.

But the city that rose to prominence in such a rush fell just as quickly thanks to the oil market crash in the spring of 1866 and a series of fires that took out blocks of the town.

“The actual town of Pithole only lasted 15 months,” Goodman says, “so almost as quickly as the town came up, it disappeared.”

In 1961, about 90 acres of the original Pithole City was donated to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which built a visitor center overlooking the former boomtown.
 

Photos rest among dirt and ditritus in ruined houses of Yellow Dog Village.
ABANDONED, NOT FORGOTTEN: Photos rest among dirt and ditritus in ruined houses of Yellow Dog Village. (Photo by Jeff Fetzer)
 

The visitor center, served by Warren Electric Cooperative, is open weekends during the summer, but the grounds, which feature mowed paths, markers where the city streets once were, and signs denoting former building locations, can be walked year-round.

Goodman say the site draws 15,000 visitors a year, largely owing to the mystique of a town that boomed and busted so explosively.

The allure of Masten

Far fewer make the journey to Masten, a remote Lycoming County ghost town, but David Richards has been exploring the ruins of the long-gone lumber town since his first visit at the age of 17 in 1974.

Richards, a licensed Gettysburg Battlefield tour guide, grew up in Picture Rocks in eastern Lycoming County and developed a passion for local history at a young age.

“My interest in Masten started after reading Tom Taber’s book, ‘Ghost Lumber Towns of Central Pennsylvania,’ around 1971,” he says. “I had never heard of Masten … so there’s a ghost town in Lycoming County? Really? And the more I read about it, the more fascinating it all became. I had to come see this place.”

Over the years, he says he has made “countless” hiking and camping expeditions to the remote mountain boomtown, which existed from 1906 to 1930 and had a population of around 1,000 at its peak. The town’s last permanent residents left in 1941, and Masten is now part of Loyalsock State Forest. A few of the community’s original homes, converted into hunting camps served by Sullivan County Rural Electric Cooperative, remain.

Richards, a collector of historic postcards, has amassed hundreds of photographs from Masten’s heyday. The images are showcased in his book, “Masten: Lumber Giant,” which delves into the town’s history and its founder, Charles W. Sones. He has also written five other books on the history of north-central Pennsylvania.

“There isn’t a lot to see today,” he says during a recent visit to the ghost town. “That’s almost the charm of it. There is nothing left. Mother Nature’s reclaimed it, and it’s returned to the wilderness from which it was born.”

On a walk, Richards points out where the town’s two mills were located as well as the clothes pin factory that employed many of the community’s women. While driving, he pulls over to view what’s left of an old dam. He can also pinpoint the town’s baseball field, school and company store.

Richards knows his way around a town that was long gone by the time he entered the world.

“You can drive through Masten today and not even know it was there,” he says. “To me, I think it is important to preserve that history while you still can. Why write the book? It was a hole in the wall of history that needed filled.”

A return to Barclay

That same sense of historic preservation is what motivated Malin D. Martin of Athens, Pa., to spend nearly three decades researching the coal-mining communities of Barclay Mountain in neighboring Bradford County. Every week, he makes the nearly hour-long drive from his home to the remote ghost town of Barclay to help resurrect and maintain the cemetery, which hasn’t had a body buried in it since the 1880s.

At its peak in the 1870s, the Village of Barclay boasted a population of more than 2,000 residents. Today, what remains is located in modern-day Franklin Township, which is serviced by Claverack Rural Electric Cooperative.

Inhabited largely by immigrant families from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Nova Scotia, the mining community had a mile-long Main Street lined with homes, three schools, a blacksmith shop, post office, sawmill, company store, doctor’s office, skating rink, saloon and three churches.

Abandoned when the big coal companies pulled up stakes around the turn of the 20th century, Barclay has since been swallowed up by the forest. The marble grave markers in the cemetery are the most visible reminder of its former existence.

“I originally started to write a book about the history of Powell (a Bradford County tannery town) in 1987,” Martin says. “I worked on that until 1995, when I was sort of arm twisted into researching Barclay Mountain because … there was a lack of good information about mining up here. It kind of snowballed a bit from there.”

After spending 27 years interviewing those with ties to the mountain and its mining history, researching coal production records and census data, and reviewing old newspapers and historical reference books, Martin wrote an extensive history of the town, “Barclay Mountain Coal Mining — Its Towns & People,” which was published in 2022. The initial run of 500 copies sold out in less than a year.

Coinciding with his work to shine a light on the mining town, Martin and several other volunteers began restoring and maintaining Barclay Cemetery, located on State Game Lands 12, in 2006. One of the mountain’s few year-round residents, Claverack member Rich Santangelo mows the cemetery grass during the summer months, and Martin clears the weeds.

Thanks to the volunteers’ diligence, most of the site’s gravestones, dating from the 1860s to 1880s, have been refurbished and repositioned. Now, only a handful await restoration and a return to their rightful resting places.
“We are doing this out of a sense of preserving the past, honoring those who came before us, and we have a genuine interest in this area and wanting to preserve what is here,” Martin says.

Their work has paid off. The now well-maintained cemetery has become a popular draw for visitors, he says. “This is unquestionably the most visited cemetery in Bradford County.”

* * *

But in the twilight of a clear August day, there’s just a solitary soul in the cemetery, taking notes and photographs and waiting for the moon to rise to enhance the mood. Startled by a raven cawing overhead, he can’t help but think, was it croaking “Nevermore?” Or, perhaps, “Never forgotten?”

 

 

 

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